As products age, it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain parts needed to repair the products. Sometimes, it is necessary to reverse engineer an integrated circuit (IC).
Destructive and non-destructive techniques such as SEM imaging, IR and X-ray techniques can be used to image an integrated circuit (IC) but these techniques produce only a low level netlist that represents the circuitry in the IC. Such a netlist is a raw netlist at the element level, i.e., resistor, capacitor, inductor and transistor levels. For large and complex ICs it is extremely hard if not impossible to understand this low level netlist in its raw form. In order to understand the functionality of the IC or whether the IC is compromised, the netlist needs to be converted to a higher level netlist. Currently, there are no automated techniques to extract hierarchy and functionality from an element level netlist.